MILWAUKEE (WI)
SNAP Wisconsin
Having spent 7.5 million fighting victims, Archbishop Listecki appears to be reversing course
September 25, 2012
Having spent 7.5 million fighting victims, Archbishop Listecki appears to be reversing course
Archdiocese signaling major breakthrough to be announced next week with 570 victims
Statement by Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director (Milwaukee)
CONTACT: 414.429.7259
Charles Dickens once wrote that the courts are where lawyers “spin masterly fictions” so judges can “waste their days reading mountains of costly nonsense.”
It is being reported today just how costly this nonsense has been for Catholics of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
The Archdiocese, which filed for bankruptcy in January of 2011, was ordered into mediation this summer with nearly 570 victim/survivors by Federal Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley. As Dickens might have predicted, Archbishop Listecki has spent an obscene 7.5 million dollars on lawyers and consultants, and not a dime on helping to heal or provide restitution to those harmed. And much of that money, all of it incidentally deriving from charitable contributions, has been used by the archdiocese to file and argue endless court motions and legal technicalities to throw out of court most of the 570 victim/survivors who have filed restitution claims. The archdiocese has also used those millions to prevent the release to the public of nearly 60,000 pages of secret church documents and depositions detailing decades of cover-up of child sex crimes by dozens of priests and employees of the archdiocese.
Ironically, when Archbishop Listecki went into bankruptcy court in January 2011 he claimed that the archdiocese had to file because it was unable to cover more than 4.5 million in mediating abuse claims, yet he has put that amount and 3 million dollars more into the pockets of lawyers in the last 22 months alone. And while Listecki has spent millions on lawyers he has so far only offered $300,000 dollars to victims and even that amount he wants to restrict to an alleged “therapy fund” to be controlled, of course, by the archdiocese.
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